Grid Review: Hustle: Street Power by Jonathan Copeland

Author’s summary: Hustle: Street Power is the captivating story of Nice Davidson, a young man near the end of his high school career who looks forward to moving on in life.

When the street life that was present during his early childhood reappears in the form of his mother’s body strewn in pieces across the back porch, Nice incorporates creative thinking to find answers as he completes his educational goals.

He creates a business that catches the attention of the current street king, someone who wants to take advantage of Nice’s status as the child of a previous kingpin. Nice needs to know who he can trust to have his back when he can no longer distinguish the line between friend and foe.

Grid Review:

Book cover

CohesiveStoryline

Editing

CharacterDevelopment

Recommend?

OverallScore

5

2

2

1

0

2

Overall Impression: The eBook price for this book is $9.99, and the print book price is $12.97.

Based on the book cover and the summary, I settled in for an exciting read!

All I can say is thank goodness a friend lent this book to me to get my impression of its content. Had I spent either amount for the book, I would be even more disappointed with it than the disappointment I felt when reading it. I only recently started speaking to my friend again, and that was only because I wanted to know why he would inflict the excruciating pain of this book on me.

First, the version of the book I read doesn’t contain anything about the main character finding “his mother’s body strewn in pieces across the back porch.”

Second, the book contained a plethora of errors in spelling/grammar/punctuation.

Third, the book was just down-right, unequivocally unbelievable. There are four scenes in particular that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

One: There’s a scene where the main character, Nice, goes to the mall, and he gets into a knock-down, drag-out fight with another teenager, Fresh, who is mistreating his girlfriend. We find out her name is Nookie. Nice beats Fresh terribly, and then he leaves with Nookie. I thought the play on words was corny: Fresh Nookie to Nice Nookie. Anyway…

My question: Where is mall security when this all-out, toe-to-toe battle is going on? No one in authority intercedes to stop the fight, and no one is arrested or rejected from the mall because of the brawl. How can any company keep a mall open if things like this happen?

Two: The scene where Nice finds his mother’s dead body was just… ugh. Let me just give you the facts as written in the book.

Nice comes home with his new female friend, Nookie, and this is when he discovers the headless body of his mother inside the house and not “strewn in pieces across the back porch.” Nice is distraught and gathers the decapitated body of his mother into his arms and cries.

The unbelievable part is the reaction of Nookie, the female friend who Nice has literally just met. Nookie, a teenager just like Nice, calmly sits next to another distraught teenager, Nice, holding the headless body of his mother and says something like, “Is there anything I can do to help?” Nookie shows no repulsion, no emotion, no hysteria, nothing. Maybe she’s a sociopath, I don’t know. I do know that there are full-grown men and women who would be totally freaked out by a headless body.

Three: Nice goes to Nookie’s house the day after his mother is killed. When Nookie introduces Nice to her parents, the father says something like, “Oh, so you’re the young man whose mother was murder,” and the father extends his hand to shake Nice’s hand. There is no “I’m sorry for your loss” or “Please accept our condolences” or anything else that shows some kind of consideration for what has just befallen this orphaned teen (we learn that Nice’s father was murdered earlier in Nice’s life).

Nice doesn’t get upset or show any reaction to the man’s words. He just shakes Nookie’s father’s hand and says something like, “Yes, sir. That’s me!”

Then… Nookie’s parents leave their own home to give Nice and Nookie their privacy, since Nookie had invited Nice over for dinner. What teenager wouldn’t want parents like Nookie’s, and how many teenagers have parents like Nookie’s?

Four: Nice decides he is going to take over the weed game from the “kingpin” who killed his father and mother, and Nice decides he’s going to do it by selling candy bars with weed baked into them for $2.

In the book, Nice is selling thousands and thousands of these candy bars to anyone and everyone, including his teachers, and he’s supposedly taking away the clientele of the resident kingpin. He’s living with a friend of his mothers, and she, along with Nookie, help him make these thousands and thousands of weed-filled chocolate bars right in the kitchen of her single-family home.

Nice and his crew have no run-ins with the law, even though he’s supposedly getting filthy rich from selling all these thousands of “special” candy bars at $2 each.

Oh, yes, and the lady he lives with, his deceased mother’s friend, not only helps him build his weed-filled-chocolate-bar empire, she also makes sure Nice gets himself to church.

There are actually more than four things I could point out that are wrong with this book, but I’m going to pass, so I can complete this review.

Let me end by saying that the reason my friend said he wanted me to read this book, and give him my overall impression, is because he saw on Twitter that the author is making the book into a movie. 😐

Buy from:

I’ve decided not to include buy links for this book, because I don’t think its purchase is a wise investment. That’s just my personal opinion, though. You might want to buy it, but I’m not going to make it a one-click process from the Index.